1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a material portioning apparatus and method which provides portions of material of predetermined weight by measuring and portioning an appropriate volume of the material.
The apparatus is especially useful when the material consists of whole pieces larger than the portioned sizes, such as fillets of fish or meat, but it can also be used for portioning granular materials, or materials of sizes smaller than the portioned sizes. It is only necessary that the material, or bulks of the material, be of such a nature that, when it is compressed in one direction, it will expand or be forced to move in a different direction.
2. Statement of the Prior Art
The prior art teaches implements for portioning materials and for weighing materials. Such apparatus are disclosed in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 1,315,675, Leary, issued Sept. 9, 1919, U.S. Pat. No. 2,764,316, Sylvest, issued Sept. 25, 1956, U.S. Pat. No. 2,889,077, Cunningham, issued June 2, 1959, U.S. Pat. No. 3,221,827, Spurlin et al., issued Dec. 7, 1965, U.S. Pat. No. 3,443,651, White, issued May 13, 1969, and, U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,394, Martin, issued June 28, 1974. However, none of these patents teaches an apparatus which can automatically portion and weigh materials.
The apparatus described below provides fish portions of predetermined weight. At present, in order to prepare fillets of fish for packaging in sizes of predetermined weights, the fillets, which are normally of a weight greater than the required weight, are cut to approximate size and then manually weighed. Any excess weight is snipped off by scissors, and small pieces are added when a piece is deficient in weight.
The disadvantages of this present method are that too many packages end up with too many pieces (it would be preferred to have only one piece in each package) and that a large number of human operators must be used in the process. Human operators are, of course, expensive, and are also subject to human error, especially in a routine job such as weighing materials.
As will be appreciated, although the invention is described with relation to the weighing and portioning of fish, it is equally applicable to other materials such as meat or granular materials providing the materials have the characteristics above described.